Thus far, this book’s meditations on the concept, imagery, and narrative role of nirvana have considered it primarily as a goal for any individual: to attain (pari)nirvana, in life and at the moment of death, is to become characterized by the epithet buddha, ‘awak-ened’. In turning now to some closer and more extended analyses of textual dynamics, of narrative as an expression and embodiment of temporality, it will look more at those special people for whom Buddha is not merely an adjective but a name. The person whose life-story is so often told as that of the Buddha Gotama – who in Pali is specified as such either by his family name Gotama or by the phrase am˙ ha¯kam˙ Buddho, ‘our Buddha’ – can be singled out in Roman script by using the definite article, capitalizing the word, or both: not just a person who is buddha, but one who is (for us) ‘a’ or (more often) ‘the Buddha’. In Pali, such Buddhas, in the past, present, and future, are differentiated from ordinary (!) enlightened people by being called samma¯-sam˙ buddha-s, Fully Enlightened Beings. They rediscover the Truth (Dhamma) by themselves, at a time when it has been lost, and re-institutionalize the dissemination of the Truth in a Dispensation (sa¯sana). In contrast, ordinary enlightened people, male and female Arahants, are buddha, ‘awak-ened’, and they become so by hearing the salvific message from a Fully Enlightened Buddha or from one of his disciples or later followers. They are also called sa¯vaka-s (Sanskrit: s´ra¯vaka), 126
Hearers. The time-space world of sam˙ sa¯ra is infinite; there have been and will be again an infinite number of (upper-case) Buddhas, each founding a Dispensation during the existence of which other people can become awakened, buddha. Therava¯da Buddhism is different from Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism in this regard only in that it regards this infinity of Buddhas as happening in a series, once at a time, rather than, as does Maha¯ya¯na, thinking that more than one Buddha can exist at the same time.
Specific arguments are given in texts as to why there cannot be two Buddhas at the same time. They are called bodhisatta-s, a word which means either ‘capable of Enlightenment’ or ‘intent on Enlightenment’, but for which the general term ‘future Buddha’ is quite appropriate. Many stories have, at any one time, future Buddhas meeting with then-present Buddha; such a meeting between an individual and a Buddha is a necessary constituent in the individual’s becoming such a bodhisatta, a future samma¯-sambuddha: the individual makes an Aspiration (adhit˙˙tha¯na) for Buddhahood, and the then-present Buddha makes a Prediction (veyya¯karan˙a) that he will become one. (One has to say he here, since one of the eight conditions for future Buddhahood is male gender; after the Prediction is given, that individual series of lives can never again be female.) As has been seen, the fact of multiple Buddhas is inherent in the logic of basic Buddhist thought; it is a presupposition of the entire system. But historically, it seems, the process of naming some of them, and telling stories about them in addition to the story of Gotama, developed only gradually. Some are mentioned in Sutta-s, texts taken to be early, but the genre in which they are most developed is that of the vam˙ sa.
The lives of past, present, and future Buddhas have both sim-ilarities and differences, which are schematized and often given in lists; such lists of epithets and attributes were often used in ritual
chanting. Modern translations often systematize information about Buddhas, as do I below. When such lists are not, or at least only to some extent, narrativized, dramatic tensions, naturally, are mini-mized; each and every Buddha goes through much the same thing, by rote as it were. But some narratives do maintain dramatic tension, sometimes to the point of melodrama. The story of the Buddha’s life must be one of the most widely told stories in all of world civilization, and rightly so. Modern Western tellings, of which new versions appear every year, psychologize and dramatize it: the young prince, dissatisfied with the life of luxury, leaves the enclosed life of the palace and discovers the truth of suffering and death, and, seeing the example of an ascetic, leaves home in order to struggle to transcend the world and becomes the perfectly serene and compas-sionate Saviour. In thinking through the issue of the narrativity of a/the Buddha’s life one should bear in mind A. K. Ramanujan’s wise and witty bon mot about the Ra¯ma¯yan˙a: namely that in Asia no-one hears such stories for the first time.1It is significant that perhaps the most strikingly realist version in Pali – one that asks the listener to suspend disbelief and follow the tale as if hearing it for the first time – is told not about the present Buddha Gotama but about a past Buddha called Vipassı¯. The text (the Maha¯pada¯na Sutta) gives names and attributes of Vipassı¯ and Gotama Buddhas, with five others in between; not only does it list various facts about each – length of life, names of chief disciples, etc.– but it gives a long list of events which are ‘(in) the nature of things (dhammata¯)’ and occur in the life of everyone. It then tells of his birth, the prediction that he will become either a Universal Monarch (a cakkavatti) or a Buddha, and how his father sequesters him in three palaces, one for each season, in an attempt to bring about the former of these two destinies. One must suspend one’s disbelief, not only in the case of such things as the enormously extended length of life ascribed to 128 nirvana: concept, imagery, narrative
people at that time (80,000 years), but also in that of the possibility that a young man could grow up and quite literally never encounter certain facts of life (his age is not specified here – Gotama is twenty-nine – and he is not said to marry and have a son, as Gotama is). If one does this, the narrative style in which his next experiences are recounted is very effectively succinct and realistic. One day he goes out for a drive to a pleasure-park with his charioteer. They encounter a grey-haired old man, bent double and leaning on a stick. Vipassı¯ asks the charioteer:
‘What is the matter with this man? His hair is not like other men’s, his body is not like other men’s.’
‘Prince,’ is the reply, ‘this is what is called an old man.’
‘But why is he called an old man?’
‘He is called old, Prince, because he has not long to live.’
‘But am I liable to become old, and [am I] not exempt from old age?’
‘Both you and I, Prince, are liable to become old, are not exempt from old age.’
‘Well then, charioteer, that will do for today with the pleasure park.
Return now to the palace.’
‘[After his return,] Prince Vipassı¯ was overcome with grief and dejection, crying, “Shame on this thing birth, since to him who is born old age must manifest itself!”’
On two further excursions, the prince encounters, similarly for the first time, a sick man and a corpse. The exchanges with the charioteer are similar, and each time he returns to the palace in grief and dejection: ‘Shame on this thing birth, since to him who is born sickness [and] death must manifest [themselves]!’ It is important to see here that the prince’s distress is as much cognitive as it is affective: he is rather like a child discovering death for the first time, and finding (as children do) that the difficulty it poses is as much conceptual as it is emotional. How can one make sense of a life that inevitably involves sickness, old age, and death? The
prince is not himself suffering directly from any of these problems;
indeed, his father redoubles his efforts to surround the prince with
‘the five-fold sense-pleasures’, so that he will not become a renouncer, and forgo kingship. But when the prince goes out for the fourth and last time, his cognitive distress is alleviated by seeing a renouncer who is, the charioteer explains, ‘one who truly follows Dhamma, who truly lives in serenity, does good actions, performs meritorious deeds, is harmless and truly has compassion for living beings’. The threat to coherence posed by old age, sickness, and death is avoided by setting human life and its defects in a universe where salvation from them is possible. The figure of the renouncer shifts the perspective of the story from the immediate here-and-now of a confused young man to that of the reflective, transcen-dentalist perspective that sets what is visible – old people, the sick, corpses – in the context of an unseen beyond, which shows the incoherent visible world to be part of a larger, coherent whole.
Vipassı¯ decides to renounce on the spot (unlike Gotama, usually).
The rest of his story is told (again, assuming appropriate suspen-sions of disbelief) in an historically realist way, ending with three verse aphorisms presented as ‘the teaching of (all the) Buddhas’.
The Discourse itself ends with a brief coda in which Gotama repeats some facts about the seven Buddhas from the opening section.
So past Buddhas are at one and the same time formulaic instan-tiations of a general type, and also individuals whose encounter with the facts of life and whose salvific realization are vivid and individual. What is to be expected of future Buddhas?
Although the logical possibility of future Buddhas is clearly recognized in the earliest texts, in those now preserved as the Canon there is but one specific treatment of an individual: the next Buddha, Metteyya. It occurs in a text called The Lion’s Roar 130 nirvana: concept, imagery, narrative
on the Wheel-turning King (Cakkavatti-sı¯hana¯da Sutta), a very important text for Buddhism and kingship. The Buddha tells a cautionary (in my view deliberately ironic and humorous) tale, of how things have declined from a fantasy utopia (where life lasted 80,000 years, kings provided wealth to their subjects so that pov-erty and theft were unknown), through a series of serio-comic mishaps, to their present sorry state. But this is not the worst:
‘There will come a time, monks, when the descendants of these people [i.e., those contemporary with the Buddha] will live for (only) ten years.
When people live for (only) ten years, their daughters will be ready for marriage at five. When people live for (only) ten years, these flavours will disappear: (those of) ghee, cream, oil, honey, molasses, and salt.
When people live for (only) ten years, the primary food will be (a kind of bad) grain. Just as now, monks, rice, meat and rice porridge are the primary foods, so, monks, when people live for (only) ten years (a kind of bad) grain will be the primary food. When people live for (only) ten years, the Ten Good Deeds will completely disappear, and the Ten Bad Deeds will rage like a great fire. When people live for (only) ten years, the idea of “good” will not exist how will there be anyone who does good? When people live for (only) ten years, those who show lack of respect for their mother and father, for ascetics and Brahmins, and for the elders of their family will be revered and praised. Whereas now, monks, those who show respect for mother and father, for ascetics and Brahmins, and for the elders of one’s family are revered and praised, when people live for (only) ten years, those who show lack of respect for their mother and father, for ascetics and Brahmins, and for the elders of their family will be revered and praised.
‘When people live for (only) ten years, [men will not recognize women as]
“mother”, “mother’s sister”, “mother’s brother’s wife”, “teacher’s wife”, or
“women of our elders” the world will become thoroughly promiscuous, just as (it is) now among goats and sheep, fowl and pigs, dogs and jackals.
When people live for (only) ten years, fierce mutual violence will arise among these beings, fierce ill will, fierce hatred, fierce thoughts of murder, in a son for his mother, in a mother for her son, in a son for his father, in a father for his son, in a brother for his brother, in a sister for her brother, and in a brother for his sister … Just as now, when a hunter sees an animal, fierce
violence, fierce ill will, fierce hatred, fierce thoughts of murder arise in him, so when people live for ten years, fierce mutual violence will arise among these beings, fierce ill will, fierce hatred, fierce thoughts of murder, in a son for his mother, in a mother for her son, in a son for his father, in a father for his son, in a brother for his brother, in a sister for her brother, and in a brother for his sister …
‘When people live for (only) ten years, there will be a seven day period of war, when people will see each other as animals; sharp swords will appear in their hands and they will murder each other, each thinking, “This is an animal.” But some of these beings will think, “Let me kill no one, let no one kill me. Why don’t I go to some inaccessible place, in (thick) grass, in a forest, in a tree, by a river where it is difficult to walk, or on a rocky mountain, and eat wild roots and fruit to keep myself alive?” [And they will do so.] After the seven days have passed, they will emerge from their [hiding places] and embrace one another joyfully, exclaiming to one another, “Wonderful! (fellow) being, you are alive!” Then, monks, those beings will think, “It is because we have undertaken bad deeds that we have for so long been murdering our (own) relatives. Why don’t we start doing good? (But) how do we do good? Why don’t we abstain from killing? Let’s undertake that good deed and practise it.” They will abstain from killing, undertake this good deed and practise it. Because of their undertaking good deeds their vitality and beauty will increase, and those who live for ten years will have children who live for twenty.
‘And then, monks, those beings will think, “It is because of undertaking good deeds that our length of life and beauty have increased. What if we were to do even more good? Why don’t we abstain from taking what is not given; abstain from misconduct is sexual matters; abstain from telling lies;
abstain from malicious speech; abstain from harsh speech; abstain from frivolous speech; abstain from covetousness; abstain from ill will; abstain from wrong view; abstain from three things: improper desire, iniquitous greed, and wrongfulness; why don’t we abstain from lack of respect for one’s mother and father, for ascetics and Brahmins, and for the elders of our families?” And they will have respect for their mother and father, for ascetics and Brahmins, and for the elders of their families; undertaking these good deeds they will practise them.
‘Because of their undertaking these good deeds their vitality and beauty will increase: among these people, increasing with respect to vitality and beauty, those who live for twenty years will have children who live for 132 nirvana: concept, imagery, narrative
forty; those who live for forty years will have children who live for eighty [and so on, back to life times of 80,000 years].
‘When people live for 80,000 years, their daughters will be ready for marriage at 500. When people live for 80,000 years, there will be only three kinds of disease: desire, hunger, and old age. When people live for 80,000 years, this Jambudı¯pa will be rich and prosperous, with villages, towns, and royal cities (so close that) a cock can fly [or: jump] from one to another.
When people live for 80,000 years, this Jambudı¯pa will be as full of people as the Avı¯ci hell, I should think, (or) like a thicket of reeds or grass! When people live for 80,000 years, this city of Benares will be called Ketumatı¯; it will be a rich and prosperous royal city, populous, full of people, and with (more than) enough to eat. When people live for 80,000 years, in this Jambudı¯pa there will be 84,000 cities, with the royal city of Ketumatı¯ at their head.
‘When people live for 80,000 years, in this royal city of Ketumatı¯ there will arise a Wheel turning king called San˙kha, righteous, a king of righteousness, a conqueror of the whole world, who will achieve stability in his country and possess the seven jewels. These seven jewels of his will be: the wheel jewel, the elephant jewel, the horse jewel, the gem jewel, the woman jewel, the householder jewel, and seventhly the adviser jewel. He will have more than a thousand sons, who will be valiant, of heroic (physical) form, crushing enemy armies. He will conquer this earth, surrounded by the ocean, and live from it, without violence, without a sword, according to what is right.
‘When people live for 80,000 years, a Blessed One called Metteyya will arise in the world, an Arahant, a Perfectly Enlightened Buddha, endowed with (perfect) wisdom and conduct, a Happy One, one who will understand the world, an unsurpassed trainer of those who are to be tamed, a teacher of gods and men, a Buddha, a Blessed One, just as now I have arisen in the world, an Arahant, a Perfectly Enlightened Buddha, endowed with (perfect) wisdom and conduct, a Happy One, one who understands the world, an unsurpassed trainer of those who are to be tamed, a teacher of gods and men, a Buddha, a Blessed One. He will understand, realize experientially, and proclaim (the true nature of) the world with its gods, its Ma¯ras, Brahmas, its ascetics and Brahmins, this world of beings born as gods and men, just as now I understand, realize experientially, and proclaim (the true nature of) the world with its gods, its Ma¯ras, Brahmas, its ascetics and Brahmins, this world of beings born as gods and men. He will teach the Dhamma, in letter and in spirit, which is beautiful in the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, and
make known (the virtues of) the pure, celibate life, just as now I teach the Dhamma, in letter and in spirit, which is beautiful in the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, and make known (the virtues of) the pure, celibate life. He will have with him a monastic order of many thousands, just as now I have one of many hundreds.
‘Then, monks, King San˙kha will raise up [from under water] the palace which King Maha¯pana¯da had built and live in it. He will (then) give it away, let it go, give it as alms (for the use of) ascetics, Brahmins, indigents, tramps, and beggars. In the presence of the Blessed One Metteyya he will cut off his hair and beard, put on yellow robes, and go forth from home to homelessness. He will be a renouncer, alone and secluded, diligent, ener getic, self determined. Living thus it will not be long before in that very life he understands, realizes experientially, takes up, and lives (the achievement of) the celibate life, for which sons from good families rightly leave home
‘Then, monks, King San˙kha will raise up [from under water] the palace which King Maha¯pana¯da had built and live in it. He will (then) give it away, let it go, give it as alms (for the use of) ascetics, Brahmins, indigents, tramps, and beggars. In the presence of the Blessed One Metteyya he will cut off his hair and beard, put on yellow robes, and go forth from home to homelessness. He will be a renouncer, alone and secluded, diligent, ener getic, self determined. Living thus it will not be long before in that very life he understands, realizes experientially, takes up, and lives (the achievement of) the celibate life, for which sons from good families rightly leave home